Obama’s Harvest of Violence

Democracy, freedom, self-determination, human and individual rights are values that Arab liberals like myself thought we shared with the United States. That’s what you told us. For years, we’ve received training and attended workshops on democracy and freedom of expression sponsored by international NGOs and NGOs funded by the United States and the Europeans.  We’ve been preached to by visiting American diplomats and think-tankers and journalists about the virtues of citizenship and democracy. We took plenty of notes. We’ve been told that if we speak out to defend our rights, we will be supported by America. And now we’ve been betrayed.

Read more at The Tablet
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

Obama Forced Bibi to the Right — and Bibi Won

By Tom Blumer - "Netanyahu did what was right for Israel — and was rewarded." The conventional wisdom in U.S. presidential campaigns is that candidates win by moving to the center in a contest’s final weeks to capture undecided “moderate” voters turned off by supposedly “extreme” sentiments.

That bromide has always been questionable. It naively and condescendingly assumes that passionate partisans will automatically show up and vote for a squish simply because he or she claims to be on their side. We’ve all heard it: “Where else are they going to go?” Ask Mitt Romney how that worked out two years ago.

Stuck in that mindset, President Barack Obama’s taxpayer-funded election fixers in Israel must have been absolutely thrilled when, just before Tuesday’s elections there, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that he no longer supports Palestinian statehood, and that he would support the building of “thousands of settler homes in Arab east Jerusalem to prevent future concessions to the Palestinians.” Read more: PJ Media

Did the Obama administration's removal of Iran and Hezbollah from the DNI's terrorism threat list influence Netanyahu's perceived change of heart? --bc Read More......